Our road to Goofy, part 2.

Posted by Jeremy Peck:     Part 1  Part 3

We started in on Dave’s plan, which at the start was 6 or 7 days a week.  The 6th and 7^th days were short distance, but it still added up.  After a couple weeks of that I immediately found that I hadn’t transitioned very well and started having some problems with my knee.  I also realized that I needed another pair of shoes to alternate with.  With the addition of the extra shoes and liberal application of ice I was able to continue with the running 6 days a week.  I soon found that I could not recover fast enough and needed to remove another day.  That settled me into 5 days a week.  I found that I could do that as long as I didn’t overdo the speed during my midweek runs.   However, as the miles began to add up I found that my earlier mistakes were still haunting me and the ice wasn’t cutting it.  I ended up moving to a compression sleeve on my knee and that immediately felt better.  I ran with it for a month or more and eventually found that I didn’t need it anymore.  Throughout this time I made sure I was doing proper post-run stretching along with periodic daily stretching to keep loose.  What we ended up doing was a Tues-Wed-Thurs-Sat-Sun program that had half the Sunday distance on Saturday, mimicking the Goofy race format.  Tues-Wed-Thurs were easy runs mostly.  The key there was to get used to running everyday but not get exhausted each day.  Once I was used to it I began throwing in more hills and doing some faster miles, but never every day.  It was also important to not exhaust yourself on the Saturday run as you really pay for it the next day.  I only made that mistake once or twice.

Early on we were all optimistic about the race.  My other cohorts are all 10 years younger than me and they recovered pretty well.  As we started getting into double digit miles on weekends I added ice baths to the mix.  I had done them before, but never quite this much.  I almost religiously took one on Saturday and another on Sunday.  In fact, I found that the days I didn’t take one I really regretted it.  What I would use is about ½ - ¾ of a 7 lb. bag of ice in the tub filled with already cold water.  Then prepare a large cup of coffee and a book and take the plunge.  As the miles started adding up and we got into the upper teens in Sunday distance, we started feeling pretty well about this.  We were easily tossing out 24 mile weekends in any weather.  We had a 70 degree weekend in November and the next week a rainy 50 degree.  Once into December we started getting 25 degree weekends, but we’ve made it so far.  My initial plans were to walk most of the Saturday half marathon and come in just under the cutoff of 3.5 hours.  That would give me plenty of steam for the Sunday race.  But now that we are done with training, we’re all feeling good and are thinking we’ll just go ahead a run the half marathon the whole way at an easy pace like we did in training.  We all felt pretty good about the 21 miler after doing 14 the day before.  Our only concern now is the weather.  It’s January in Orlando, Fl.  The averages are from 50 deg for a low to 70 for a high, but the races start at 6 am.  We’ll just have to wait and see what weather we get.  If it’s a lower than average day we could have a perfect race.  Over, we’re screwed.

Part 1  Part 3